In today's world of globalization, organizations operate from branches located in multiple countries and cities across the world. To make the best use of resources and available talent, organizations prefer acquiring local talent in every country they have offices located. This strategy helps them reduce costs and acquire diversified talent; however, coordinating work across teams located at different parts of the world becomes a challenge. This is especially true in the case of software development organizations, in which a single project may involve people from different countries.
In particular, project managers usually find it difficult to manage communication between their team members located at different locations. For example, if one of the team members is based out of US and the other members are based out of different locations in India, it may become challenging for a project manager located in the UK to coordinate with them. If, for example, the project manager wants to schedule a call with his/her team, he/she will first have to check calendars of each team member to determine their availability (provided the calendars of all the team members are connected to a central server and the project manager has exclusive permissions to access their calendars), calculate the time difference between the three countries and send them meeting invites for a call at a suitable time.
Specifically, there are several issues associated with the scenario mentioned above. Firstly, there is a manual labor involved in checking in everyone's calendars, estimating the time for the call based on the time difference, and sending the invites. Considering that these processes are done manually, chances of human error are considerable. For example, the project manager may make a mistake in calculating time difference between the three geographical locations.
Another issue associated with sending meeting invites for a call is that responses to the invites must be received before the call is scheduled. To understand this point clearly, consider a scenario where an important team member is unable to check his/her emails or calendar on time. In this case, he/she may miss out on sending response (either acceptance or rejection) to the sender before the call and the sender may go ahead and schedule the call without even knowing the availability of the important team member. This may create unnecessary trouble for all the attendees of the call, and the call may have to be rescheduled at the last moment.
Usually people are not able to respond to meeting invites sent to them because of varied reasons. Examples of these reasons include, but are not limited to, not being present on their work stations due to different work hours when a meeting request is received or loss of network connection, e.g., while driving or due to some technical problem.
In light of the above, a system and a method are required by which communication between team members can be handled effectively and which overcomes the limitations mentioned above.